Based on close readings of five Victorian novels, Hallum presents an original study of the interaction between popular fiction, the marriage market and the aesthetic movement. She uses the texts to trace the development of aestheticism, examining the differences between the authors, including their approach, style and gender. Wider issues concerning Victorian womanhood, marriage and commodity culture are also explored. This book will be of interest to scholars of book history as well as literature and nineteenth-century society.

"This comprehensively researched book surveys the tendency to fetishize and commodify the female body during the aesthetic movement." --Talia Schaffer, Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, Review 19 "Hallum's first monograph is promising and contains fascinating insights into the evolution of aestheticism and its effects on popular conceptions of female beauty?This is a useful volume for scholars interested in the role of nature and artifice in relation to female beauty and aestheticism." --Laura Chilcoat, University of Florida, The Latchkey "In Aestheticism and the Marriage Market in Victorian Popular Fiction, Kirby-Jane Hallum situates this familiar narrative in the context of British aestheticism and its images of women as beautiful objects. Drawing on the work of such feminist scholars as Talia Schaffer and Kathy Psomiades, Hallum contributes to the study of gender and aestheticism by examining the influence of the movement, in its various late-Victorian permutations, on literary representations of the economics of marriage." -Tamar Heller, University of Cincinnati, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies